Well, for anyone who isn’t aware, I’ve been participating in the Inktober challenge. It simply entails doing one ink drawing a day for the month of October with the goal of improving one’s inking skills and fostering good art habits (daily practice). It seems it has taken up most of my studio time these days, especially because I’ve had the problem of falling a day or several behind due to weekend commitments and life thingies. I am currently caught up, though, with 23 drawings in the tank. I’ve been posting them to my Facebook page (which you should all be following because you love my brain) but I plan on doing one monster recap post sometime after the 31st.

In the meantime, I haven’t put much time into the 10 Things project, though I am getting close to the final page.

Toby-Gray-10-things-progress-page-thumbnails

Only 5 empty boxes to fill…sorry, you’ll have to wait until it’s done to get a better view of all these pages.

As I’ve been finishing pages, I’ve been throwing them onto this thumbnail sheet, just so I can keep track of things and get a general idea of the overall flow. The double boxes indicate pages that face each other, and I’ve laid it out such that the left hand page contains all the previous things, and the right hand page introduces the next thing. It should read the same way it’s spoken in that sense.

So, yeah. I’ve been having fun honing my inking skills all month long so far, and at least a few of the drawings are decent. I’ve been sticking to a self-portrait theme, it’s been an interesting additional challenge to come up with new and fresh ways to do the same thing each day. It’s also some good practice to improve the way I draw heads and faces in general. I think after Inktober is all done for this year, I may stick to doing ink drawings once or a few times a week as the mood suits. It has definitely been good to have a definite task waiting for me in the studio each day, and I do feel like I’m improving my skills a little.